by Kirk Russell
Half an hour later we heard gunfire, then return fire, and we stopped walking. I marked the time: 12:32 p.m.
“They must have run all the way out,” I said.
“I would too.”
Before we got out, a deputy radioed that the male was dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The dog was also dead, shot after it flushed a deputy hiding along the trail. The blond woman never appeared, and we later learned she’d done a U-turn, rousted the dope-growing nephew, Vance Sidle, out of his tent, and marched him four miles to where he kept his van hidden.
Vance was found barefoot and hypothermic near Mount Lassen at four the next morning. He’d been caught in a late-spring snow and hailstorm. The van was left on the shoulder twenty miles farther north. My guess is she rendezvoused with a ride.
Sidle was taken to a medical clinic in Chico. His potassium levels were high. If he’d been out much longer he likely would have died of hypothermia. He got lucky and was in a hospital bed sleeping when I walked in and woke him the next morning.
“Am I busted?” Sidle asked as he looked around trying to figure out how to escape.
They were able to get him back with heated intravenous fluids, and he was definitely back and didn’t want to answer questions. He closed his eyes as I slid a chair over.
“I was with your uncle Callan yesterday. I’m working the grid attacks. Your uncle called me when you told him that the people camping near you looked like the Blond Bomber and her friend. You were right, and I want everything you can tell me about her and him. How are you feeling?”
“I’m ready to get out of here,” he said.
“Your uncle also told me you’ve seen the cell-tower sniper more than once back in the area. Is that true?”
“Yeah, same dude.
“Ever see him with the Blond Bomber or her friend?”
“No, those two just got there. The cell shooter dude comes and goes.”
We were another hour getting him checked out, and he was very agitated about the bills he signed for. He didn’t have medical coverage. I let him talk through that then got to it.
She had opened the flap of his tent with a rifle barrel, then marched him out four miles to his van. She sat behind him with her gun pointed at him as he drove. He’d seen tears running down her cheeks when he looked in his rearview mirror.
“She wanted to know why I’m living the way I am and what I want for the future. She said the second war for independence has started. I didn’t know what she meant by that.”
“Didn’t she explain?”
“Yeah, we talked. Some of it I get.”
“Were you surprised when she drove off and left you?”
“It sucked.”
The closest field office was Sacramento, but I took him to San Francisco, where Jace and I could question him together. On the drive he told me more of what Balco had said to him about the rebellion. “Rebellion” was her word. She’d told him people would join them once they understood what they were trying to do. It was as improbable as an ISIS soldier dreaming of a caliphate, but if Sidle’s account was true, she believed people were ready.
Sidle was nervous when we reached the field office. At the security checkpoint, he emptied his pockets, handed over his wallet, and took off his shoes, belt, and a ring. This procedure was so unfamiliar to him I realized he hadn’t flown anywhere in a long time, if ever. In the interview room I tried to calm him.
“You’re not under arrest, and I brought you here.”
He looked at photos that included a woman named Laura Balco who early this morning had been identified as the Blond Bomber. Without hesitation he pointed to her. Balco’s companion who died on the trail was in a morgue and would get identified soon. We didn’t really need him to ID that man, so I focused on the mysterious third man who was the Tower 36 shooter and camped on and off in the area.
I mixed Corti’s photo in with five that looked a lot like Corti, then spread them on a table in front of Sidle. It took him about five seconds to pick out Corti.
“I’m deadass sure,” he said. “That’s the cell-tower dude. He’s not around much, but he comes back there. I never saw him with whatshername Balco or the dude the deputies popped, but they weren’t there for that long.”
I tried to get my head around the three of them in the same area. Wasn’t coincidence, that was for sure, but I didn’t have a good explanation today. And yet, Corti connected with them somehow. I dropped Sidle at a bus stop and gave him money to buy a ticket home. That night I dreamed of a long-ago painting. In it, warriors are bringing down a huge bison with spears and arrows. No single wound will be enough, but eventually the bison would drop to its knees, and the fatal wound would come.
27
Klamath Falls, Oregon, May 1st
In Klamath Falls, Oregon, an ANFO bomb in a retired school bus and another built in the bed of a Ford 350 diesel pickup exploded outside the Captain Jack substation at 2:46 a.m. The blasts interrupted the California-Oregon Intertie and woke people forty miles away. An intertie connects two or more utilities, but an easier way to think about it is scale. Hydroelectric power generated at dams north of Captain Jack and flowing toward California just got interrupted.
I caught a flight to Portland, and an FBI pilot ferried me southeast to Bend, where I rented a car and drove farther south to Klamath Falls. Like a number of other key substations, this one had been hardened with perimeter upgrades, but what the bombers did was simple and effective.
They brought four vehicles—cameras captured this. An ancient dump truck rolled up to the gate, maneuvered back and forth and blocked it. The bomb vehicles—the old school bus and Ford pickup—drove in opposite directions along the perimeter. The pickup broke off to the right and parked close to a set of towers that fed the substation from the north, bringing electricity generated at the dam. The bomb bus struggled with a sandy patch as it worked its way to the south towers. I saw the deep sandy tracks left behind after the bus made it through and nosed between two high transmission towers outside the fence on the southeast side at the start of the run to California.
Along a dirt road heading northwest away from the substation, a nondescript white Land Cruiser waited. After the bombers and the dump-truck driver climbed into it, the Land Cruiser drove slowly away.
Four minutes, eleven seconds later, at 2:46 a.m., the bombs detonated, bringing down the towers and severely damaging each of the next towers in the chain in either direction.
At the substation there was chaos and a frantic call for help from a battery-powered radio. The lone operator panicked, fearing the dump truck held another bomb. Who could blame him for scaling the fence and running rather than following shutdown procedures?
When I arrived, the dump truck had been moved and emergency power restored to the control building. I watched what video there was, then talked with the FBI bomb squad from Portland. The blast wave appeared similar to the LA bombs. No investigation would occur until the high-tension lines were cleared out of the way. The Portland squad didn’t need me working the bomb site, but it was good to talk and share information.
We watched the surveillance video together. The getaway vehicle, the Land Cruiser, had five occupants, not four. The three drivers got in the back. In the front seats the driver was male, the individual in the passenger seat was likely a female.
A BOLO—be on the lookout—went out on the Land Cruiser, now identified as a 2007 model, to all of Oregon and Northern California. Locally, a hard push was made to find anybody who at that hour might have been outside or driving.
That push resulted in a resident of Klamath Falls coming forward on the condition he remain anonymous. His wife was out of town. He was returning from a friend’s house at 3:30 in the morning. That friend was a close female friend of his wife. He was promised anonymity.
He’d seen an older white Land Cruiser southbound on Highway 140 and remembered it because there was next to no traffic, and he was watching every vehicle for anyone who might recognize
him and wonder why he was out so late. CNN had his name before noon. An affiliate TV station sent a cameraman and a reporter. They knocked, and he opened his front door with his wife standing nearby.
The blast cut the school bus in half. I stood near the sandy white crater torn in the soil. Enough is enough, I thought. We should, as of today, limit the size of vehicles anywhere near a substation anywhere in America. I considered that as I walked a wider perimeter and found the school bus steering wheel thrown two hundred yards from the blast site.
As FBI agents and more police officers arrived, there was talk, but it was quiet talk. It could have been the wind making it hard to communicate, but I didn’t think so. The repeated attacks were taking their toll. We were realizing how much of what we have is built on trust and how difficult it would be to protect without that.
“Should I fly there?” Jace asked.
“No need. There are a dozen agents out of the Portland field office here, but let’s talk. It’s ANFO again. It’s similar if not the same bomb design as LA. Add up the ammonium nitrate used between them, and it’s enough volume to where it’s got to be a legitimate buyer.”
“Doesn’t have to be.”
I said, “Okay, it doesn’t, but it’s leaning that way. I’m not saying the legitimate buyer would be a suspect, but ammonium nitrate is funneling from somewhere.”
“Our analysts have looked at farms and other businesses using ammonium nitrate. We’ve got that report. I thought you read it.”
“I did. But maybe we take another look with different criteria.”
“Such as?”
“What farms,” I said, “with significant regular orders of ammonium nitrate have changed hands in the last three years. No, make it five years, and let’s zero in on the opaque entities and changes in crops versus five years ago. I don’t think those get tracked well. You buy a certain tonnage of ammonium nitrate, they look for you to buy more or less the same, but what if the crop is different so you don’t need as much. Is that change reliably being tracked without self-reporting? DHS says yes, but I don’t know.”
“What about this Land Cruiser seen driving southbound at three thirty this morning?” Jace asked.
“They got too much of a head start, but we might catch them on a camera. Take a look at Highway 140. That’s where the Land Cruiser got seen heading south toward California.”
I heard her fingers clicking on a keyboard. She said something to herself and her fingers stopped, then the clicking started again.
“Some of the passes they may have crossed over have cameras. Caltrans might be able to help. I’ll get on that,” she said.
“Worth a try. If you find something—”
“I’ll call you. There’s something else to talk about too. The Sacramento office called my domestic terrorism supervisor. Oroville is their territory—”
“I thought it was all worked out.”
“It is getting worked out. I’m just giving you a heads up,” she said. “Sacramento may require an agent with us anytime we’re in their area, or they’ll put a timeframe on it or limit what we investigate.”
“Tell them it’s just Corti. We’ll stay away from everything else.”
“They got hot about you hiking in with the sheriff without letting them know.”
“I did let them know.”
“Then it got lost somewhere.”
“Give up everything except Corti.”
“I heard you the first time.”
She called again after I’d left Klamath Falls and was across the California border, at least one hundred miles south with a long drive still ahead.
“Just maybe,” she said. “The timing is right. It’s a 2007 white Land Cruiser, a male at the wheel, a female riding shotgun, three people in back. I just sent you a photo, and a blow-up of the female.”
“License plates?”
“Partial, but we found it, and I talked to the former owner. He sold it eighteen months ago to a guy named Nick, Rick, or Dick.”
“No last name?” I asked.
“None. Sold it in a parking lot for cash.”
“A 2007 Land Cruiser is going to suck gas. I don’t think those things got more than fifteen miles per gallon.”
“We’re checking,” she said, “but it’s not going to be easy.”
I looked at the time: 2:08 p.m. They probably crossed into California no later than 4:30 this morning, so more than nine and a half hours ago. They could be anywhere.
“Take a look at the blow-up of the female.”
“Okay, pulling over now.” I exited onto an overpass at the top of a long rise where the surrounding country was forested, then crossed over and sat off to the side of the onramp. I looked at the photo expecting our Blond Bomber. But I was wrong.
“It’s not her,” I said, “but you know who it could be. I see some resemblance . . . I don’t know. Let’s see if facial recognition gets us anywhere.”
“I ran it. It gets us a list of low probabilities with known suspects.”
“How low?”
“Nine percent chance it’s the Blond Bomber.”
“Run it with Samantha Clark,” I said.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll do it right now. They’re waiting for me to call anyway. Hey, Grale, are you still thinking we’ll follow up with the tip in Tracy? That’s a long drive for you.”
“I’m good for it. I’m still game. I’ll meet you there, but call me back before if you learn any more.”
When she called back she said, “Nothing definitive, but it’s interesting. The probability jumped to fifty-three percent when we ran it with Clark’s face. You might be onto something. What if you are? This is your niece’s friend. What would that mean, Paul?”
28
Julia called as I drove south toward Tracy and said, “I want to check a story Mom once told me.”
“What’s it about?”
“You.”
“Why today?”
“I want to know if the story is true. Mom said you were fifteen and a half when you trashed a guy’s car with a tire iron. Tell me what happened.”
“I’ll tell you the condensed version.”
I told her Melissa and a friend got worried about an older guy—he was maybe twenty years older—who drove an old El Camino. They remembered the El Camino better than him because it had white stripes on the hood. He seemed to be following them.
“They’d seen him too often,” I said. “One night your mom and a friend met at a theater. They drove there separately, and Melissa was pretty sure the guy with the El Camino followed her home. That was the night she told me. This was in July.”
“And when did the thing at the river happen?”
“The following Saturday. There was a place where people would swim in the river at night. In some trees there was this area where everybody parked, and then you went down the trail with flashlights unless there was a good moon. But there were also other places people parked farther back and upstream.”
“Was it mostly a boyfriend-girlfriend thing?”
“Definitely that, but others too. Groups would meet there.”
“And party?”
“Sure. Your mother came up the trail one night planning to go home, and he was near her car and tried to keep her from closing the door as she got in. Your mom was quick, though, and got the car started and backed up so fast he had to dive out of the way. The police came out and looked around for a couple of days or so, and then about two weeks later Melissa was back out there with friends. But so was I.”
“And you did what?”
“He was down along the water sitting on a rock. I got the keys from Melissa and got a tire iron then hiked up the river and found his car.”
“He wasn’t parked in the lot?”
“No.”
“And he was just sitting on a rock by the river?”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t tell her about the rage inside as I brok
e every window of the El Camino as well as the headlights and taillights. Or that I knew he wouldn’t call the police.
“Mom said you destroyed his car.”
“Those El Caminos were more like a small-bed pickup, so I didn’t destroy it. But I made it a problem to drive.”
“Why didn’t you call the police or go get them instead of attacking his car?”
“I probably should have.”
“What did you do with the tire iron?”
“I broke the windows, headlights, and taillights, and other things that would send a message.”
“What do you think now?”
“Melissa never saw him again.”
“And that’s all, that’s enough for you?”
“I learned I have it in me.”
“Do you regret it?”
“In some ways, but no, I don’t regret it. Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.”
“When did you last see Sam Clark?”
“A few days ago. I’ve been thinking about Sam and Nick and a lot of stuff. I should stand on my own more. I’ve trusted too much.”
Jo sees intense humiliation and a loss of self-esteem in Julia. She says we have to talk and keep talking to her, keep countering any comments she makes diminishing herself. Jo hasn’t voiced it, but I’m sure the risk of suicide has crossed her mind. What I was hearing from Julia was a tracking back, a reexamining of the relationships in her life looking for what was true, if anything.
It may sound callous, but I knew the feeling from investigations where I’d made a wrong turn and then built on my mistake. Later, you go back. You try to figure it out. When you do, your confidence returns, you go forward again, and things get better.
I talked more with Julia, then got into a debate with Mara about whether to go public with Corti’s name and face. I was against it, but Mara was all but telling me he was going to put Corti’s face out there.
In Tracy, Jace and I met with a young PG&E systems manager named Drake Brown. Brown monitored substations along Path 66, among other duties. The paths are the routes high-voltage lines travel. They number from 1 to 81. I’ve seen my share of those 81.
